Applying for access

Access to the FPGA testbed is free for scientific and engieering workloads. There are two steps required for accessing the system, firstly we need to approve your access and secondly you will need to sign up to the system.

Step one, access approval

You should first send an email to fpga-testbed@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk giving a brief description of who you are, your institution affiliation and what you are planning to use the FPGA testbed for (e.g. what codes you are interested in accelerating). There are two purposes to this step, firstly ensuring that users are utilising the system appropriately but also we are able to offer software support.

Step two, apply for access via SAFE

You should only do this step after receiving a reply from the previous step. The machine is managed by SAFE, and to request an account you should visit https://safe.epcc.ed.ac.uk/ and sign up. This is a two stage process, you first sign up for a web account, and once that is created go into SAFE and click Login accounts and Request login account. Enter the project code nx08 and request an account on hydra-vpn. You should then repeat this process requesting an account on NextgenIO. The usernames you select for both these machines can be the same.

Once you have applied for an account it typically takes a few hours for it to be created. You can use the documentation on this web page to get information on how to access the system and tools that are available for FPGA programming. If you have problems or question, feel free to email the fpga-testbed@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk list for further help.